1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method and system for displaying an array of reduced-size pictures in a frame and to apparatuses incorporating the same such as a video editing apparatus, a movie or image data base system, a video monitoring apparatus, etc. The displayed pictures may be still pictures, frames of different videos and/or different frames of a single video (A video means a series of moving pictures).
2. Description of the Prior Art
There are a variety of systems that need to display a plurality of pictures at a time. Japanese unexamined patent publication No. Hei5-19731 issued Jan. 29, 1993 discloses a moving picture image display device. In this device, each of the video is encoded in a predetermined format and stored in a hard disc in advance. Displaying a plurality of moving pictures at a time is achieved by decoding only intra-coded frames of a desired moving picture, reducing the size of the decoded frames into an appropriate size, and displaying the reduced-size frames at a time as a single moving picture. The intra-coded frames used for display are frames which have been coded as a still picture by means of DCT (discrete cosine transform) and accordingly can be decoded alone without a need of referring to other frame(s).
However, since each of the frames to be displayed has to be decoded in this scheme, if a larger number of frames are to be displayed at a time, the scheme requires more decoders or a faster decoder. Also, it takes a significant time to display a plurality of pictures because the operations of reduction and decoding are performed each time of display.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a system and method for displaying an array of desired pictures from available moving and/or still pictures at a time with a single decoder by reducing the size of the available moving and/or still pictures before encoding them.
According to the invention, a method of displaying a plurality of specified ones of pictures in an array of windows provided on a display screen of a computer based system is provided. The method comprises the steps of reducing in size the pictures into size-reduced pictures with a size of the frames; coding the size-reduced pictures into coded size-reduced pictures; storing the coded size-reduced pictures in a mass storage device; in response to a predetermined signal and a list of pictures to be displayed, compiling a frame comprising coded size-reduced pictures specified by the list; decoding the compiled frame for display.